The welfare state, not social workers, sealed the fate of Baby P

When are we going to stop blaming social workers for the death of Baby P? Last night's PanoramaÂ painted Haringey Council as the most useless organisation in the world, and while it also pointed out how overworked social workers are, it did not even touch on what Lefties like to call "the root causes".

The welfare state killed Baby P. It was the welfare state that gave his mother a three-bedroom flat after she became a single mother of three. After Peter was taken to hospital for the first time, his battered body showing clear signs of abuse, Haringey swapped this flat for a four-bedroom house presumably in the belief that rewarding her for abuse would make her less likely to repeat it.

It was this property that attracted her boyfriend – an illiterate, 6ft 4in knife obsessive – and so sealed Peter's fate. He endured months of abuse, including one occasion where he was punched so hard he swallowed a tooth, before dying from his injuries in 2007.

The Times called the man, who has since been convicted of raping a two-year-old girl, Baby P's "stepfather" – their inverted commas. The welfare state has created a whole group of inverted commas stepfathers – men who prey on single mothers because single mothers almost always have a state-provided flat, as well as crushingly low levels of self-confidence and a proven track record of falling for men's lies.

I can think of no man nobler than a good stepfather, a calling that is truly Christian in that it goes against all our base, genetic instincts. But "stepfathers", those transient, semi-homeless good-for-nothings who swarm around welfare housing like bees around honey, are another matter.

The think-tank Civitas, in their study of family break-up and child abuse, point out: "The use of the term step-father has become problematic, as, whilst it used to refer to men who were married to women with children by other men, it is now used to describe any man in the household, whether married to the mother or not. An NSPCC study of 1988 which separated married step-fathers from unmarried cohabiting men found that married step-fathers were less likely to abuse: 'for nonnatal fathers marriage appears to beÂ associated with a greater commitment to the father role'."

The study points out:Â "According to data from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), young people are five times more likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment if they grew up in a lone-parent family, compared with children in two-birth-parent families."

They also state that children in step-families are 100 times more likely to be fatally abused than children living with their biological father.Â

"Analysis of 35 cases of fatal abuse which were the subject of public inquiries between 1968 and 1987 showed a risk for children living with their mother and an unrelated man which was over 70 times higher than it would have been for a child with two married biological parents."

So let's stop blaming social workers, who can only fight a forest fire with water pistols, and let's also stop focusing on one poor child in north London, which comforts us into thinking his case was unusual. There are 29,000 children on the national register of children at risk, and one child is murdered at home every week.Â

The state can provide for its step-children, but even with an army of social workers it cannot perform the most basic task of a father â€“ to protect his child from harm.